From Sun to Sun, 2024

From Sun to Sun investigates the changing working conditions of agricultural laborers in Puglia over a period of seventy years, intertwining two video channels projected side by side: on the left, archival footage depicts the working and social conditions of agricultural laborers between the 1940s and 1960s; on the right, footage shot in the countryside around Foggia and Rignano Garganico portrays the present-day state of those same places.

Connecting the two periods is the voice of a former agricultural laborer, now involved in protecting the rights of agricultural workers, whom I personally interviewed. His testimony recounts the current condition of agricultural laborers. The parallel editing thus brings memory and the present into dialogue, from the first rights and recognition achieved through the efforts of trade unionist Giuseppe Di Vittorio to the forms of exploitation that are still widespread in the Puglian countryside.

The archival materials come from the Audiovisual Archive of the Workers’ and Democratic Movement, the Historical Archive of the Istituto Luce, and the Historical Archive of the CGIL. Here, they are placed in direct relation to the voice recorded in the field, not simply as historical documentation, but as a means of questioning the persistence of working conditions that, decades later, still struggle to change.

From Sun to Sun thus offers a portrait suspended between past and present, in which the land of Puglia continues to bear the traces of a hardship that time has not entirely erased.